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Wine is a compatibility layer for running Windows apps and games on Linux, a major part of Valve's Proton and now Wine 11 is finally here.

Each year a new main release is made, so that developers and users have something stable to work with. After that, it splits off again into development releases towards the next major version. So in a few weeks we'll see the first Wine 11.1 build, which will be work towards Wine 12 around this time next year.

Coming in hot with absolutely masses of improvements throughout the whole project. From performance upgrades to massive technical changes, there's a little something for everyone. Some highlights like better Wayland support, better pure 64-bit support to run 32-bit apps, it will use the NTSync kernel module when available for better accuracy and performance, improved ARM64 support and so much more.

This paper is one of the more interesting takes on context extension I have seen in a while because it challenges the assumption that we need explicit positional encodings during inference. The authors make a case that embeddings like RoPE act more like scaffolding during construction rather than a permanent load bearing wall. The idea is that these embeddings are crucial for getting the model to converge and learn language structure initially, but they eventually turn into a hard constraint that prevents the model from generalizing to sequence lengths it has never seen before.

The methodology is surprisingly straightforward since they just take a pretrained model and completely drop the positional embeddings before running a very quick recalibration phase. This process essentially converts the architecture into a NoPE or No Positional Embedding model where the attention mechanism has to rely on the latent positioning it learned implicitly. It turns out that once you remove the explicit constraints of RoPE the model can extrapolate to context windows significantly longer than its training data without the perplexity explosions we usually see.

It is pretty wild to see this outperform techniques like YaRN on benchmarks like Needle In A Haystack while using a fraction of the compute. I think this suggests that Transformers are much better at understanding relative positions from semantic cues than we give them credit for. If this holds up it means we might be wasting a lot of resources trying to engineer complex interpolation methods when the answer was just to take the training wheels off once the model knows how to ride.

As expected, Wine 11.0 stable was officially released today. This is a big step forward for this open-source software to run Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Wine also serves as the basis for Valve's Steam Play (Proton) that has been critical to the recent successes of Linux gaming.

Wine 11.0 brings NTSYNC support when running on recent versions of the Linux kernel, the new WoW64 mode is stable, exclusive full-screen mode support, better Wine Wayland driver support, Vulkan improvements, and various other gaming enhancements like better joystick and gamepad support.

Do you know which is the most popular GNOME extension out there?

I don't know for sure, but if I have to make a guess, I would say Dash to Dock is a good candidate for that title.

Why do I say that? Because at the time of writing this article, this extension has more than ten million downloads.

What is Dash to Dock?

In the clean GNOME layout, you don't see any quick launcher. It's just the wallpaper. You press the Super key (Windows key), a launcher appears at the side or on the bottom. This launcher is called Dash in GNOME. The Dash to Dock extension takes the "dash" from GNOME Activities Overview and "docks" it to make it visible on the desktop all the time.

Hardest is getting removed from Steam by the developer at the end of the month, as they say "AI is bad" and "AI is evil" - oh my. Never heard of it until it was pointed out on Mastodon to me.

In a Steam announcement the developer mentioned they made the game in a few Summer months using AI "because in university there is so much brainwashing on students and all the tools are given for free". Now they have "realized the AI is not actually free, and it has a major effect on the economy and environment." and that some AI companies "can use this game just existing as a reason the get more investment for their AI companies, that benefit no one, but rather suck resources from the economy from hard working people".

After a Kickstarter success back in 2022, the medieval kingdom builder Earth of Oryn is set to enter Early Access on January 19th. It looks promising but it's far from finished.

FFmpeg developer Lynne has landed a number of Vulkan-related imporvements to this widely-used open-source multimedia library. Over the past year FFmpeg saw Vulkan shader-based decoding for more video formats, AV1 and VP9 extension work, performance improvements, and other work around Vulkan Video. It will be very exciting to see how FFmpeg delivers in 2026 with Vulkan Video and how the software ecosystem as a whole begins taking up this cross-platform, open industry standard for video encode/decode.

The Lidice massacre (Czech: Vyhlazení Lidic) was the complete destruction of the village of Lidice in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which is now a part of the Czech Republic, in June 1942 on orders from Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and acting Reichsprotektor Kurt Daluege, successor to Reinhard Heydrich. It has gained historical attention as one of the most documented instances of German war crimes during World War II, particularly given the deliberate killing of children.

It has been a long road for Hytale but the sandbox exploration RPG is now officially out in Early Access, with Native Linux support. Giving you a procedurally generated world full of dungeons, secrets, and a variety of creatures that you can shape block by block. Like a mixture of Minecraft with a proper RPG, it's an interesting mixture but very early days for it.

The Linux version as they previously announced comes as a Flatpak, which has its own launcher that will download and apply updates for you.

Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown is getting ready for warp speed with a new combat deep dive trailer, and they've announce a release for February 18th.

Giving you the chance to blast through the Delta Quadrant your own way, making choices that Captain Janeway never made, there's a lot of ways you can change your run through - and even end it rather early. Peace at all costs? Take over everything? The adventure this time is your own. Blending elements of strategy, resource management, exploration and more - it has all the makings to be a good one.

I just open sourced my personal project for tracking relationships. It's like a CRM but for people you actually care about, not sales leads.

The problem: We all have hundreds of contacts scattered everywhere, but can we remember when we last talked to an old friend? Their birthday? How we met them?

The solution: Nametag helps you track people, map how they're connected, and visualize your network as an interactive graph.

Features:

• Track people with flexible attributes (birthdays, contact info, notes)
• Map relationships (family, friends, colleagues, custom types)
• Network graph visualization showing how everyone connects
• Custom groups for organizing contacts
• Birthday and contact reminders
• Dark mode, internationalization (EN/ES)
• Mobile-responsive

Tech stack:

• Next.js 16 with TypeScript
• PostgreSQL + Prisma ORM
• D3.js for graph visualization
• Redis for rate limiting
• Tailwind CSS
• Docker Compose deployment

Why AGPL-3.0?

I chose AGPL instead of MIT/Apache because I want to ensure that if someone modifies and deploys Nametag (especially as a hosted service), they have to contribute their improvements back to the community. Personal relationship data is sensitive - users should always have the right to inspect and modify the code handling their data.

Dual model:

• Hosted SaaS: https://nametag.one/ (free tier: 50 people, paid from $1/month) - sustains development

• Self-hosted: Unlimited contacts, complete data ownership, free forever

The SaaS helps fund development, but self-hosting is a first-class citizen with no compromises. Auto-verified accounts, no email service required, works completely offline.

Contributing:

Looking for contributors! Areas where help would be awesome:

• Additional language translations (currently EN/ES)
• Graph visualization improvements (performance with 500+ nodes)
• Mobile app (Native would be great, but also open to React Native or similar)
• Export/import formats (vCard, CSV, etc.)
• Documentation improvements

GitHub: >https://github.com/mattogodoy/nametag

I'd be happy to hear any suggestions you might have. Have a nice day!

Developer @SomeDudeFromSpace@lemmy.ml